Friday Catalogs: Simon & Schuster and Counterpoint/Soft Skull Summer ’08

Simon & Schuster

First up is a book I’ve been hearing a lot about lately, The Book of Chameleons by Angolan Jose Eduardo Agualusa (available, trans. Daniel Hahn). The book received last year’s Independent Foreign Fiction Prize and has been likened to Barges and Calvino. It involves a man who sells pasts, and the plot deals with Angola’s history. Reviews in The Complete Review and the Orlando Sentinel.

I’m heartened to see Simon & Schuster publishing a collection of short stories in translation, Love Today (available, trans. Anthea Bell). The author is Maxim Biller, who has placed two stories from this collection of 27 in The New Yorker.

Currently available is a book that is getting a number of good reviews (see the LA Times and The Barnes & Noble Review), The God of War by Marisa Silver. The book takes place near the Salton Sea at the bottom of  California and deals with a broken family living in a trailer. As James Gibbons puts it in the Times,

This air of thickening menace is enhanced by the narrative’s setting in
1978, well before the spectacular mass deaths of wildlife at the Salton
Sea in the 1990s but at a time when the area’s imminent environmental
catastrophe had eerily begun to manifest itself. Scores of tilapia
carcasses wash ashore toward the end of novel; a week later, area
residents discover the remains of pelicans and other birds that had
eaten the fouled fish.

Also worth mentioning that is that S&S will publish over here in July the 2007 Costa award winner, The Tenderness of Wolves (Stef Penney). If you’re interested in more, you can read a fair amount of it on Google Books.

Counterpoint/Soft Skull

Author Tom McCarthy, who saw a lot of success with his novel Remainder, is now publishing a nonfiction study of the comic books about Tintin, the young Belgian reporter, entitled Tintin and the Secret of Literature (available). For more, see the review in the current Bookforum:

McCarthy’s answer, mercifully, is no. Comic books are not literature,
he contends; Hergé’s groundbreaking books, which, as interviewer Numa
Sadoul has noted, “take up an or­ig­inal and autonomous ground between
drawing and writing,” are especially not literature. To read them with
reverence would be a terrible mistake. Which is not to say that Tintin
harbors no secrets. On the contrary, the oeuvre, as McCarthy
demonstrates with hermeneutic élan, is full of mysteries, the most
important of which is Tintin the character’s relationship to literature
itself.

David Ohle’s The Pisstown Chaos sounds just strange enough to be interesting, a novel about "disease and forced relocation." It involves decreed de- and re-coupling every five years and, parasitic infections, and someone called Revered Herman Hooker.

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